Too AI; Didn't Read (tai-dr.com)

87 pointsby rfonsecaan hour ago84 comments

bmacho 11 minutes ago

The first comment with "ai;dr", according to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=true&que... is by user 'madcaptenor' from 11 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45722069#45725169

tptacek an hour ago

While I agree with the sentiment, this:

If you couldn't bother to read it, why should I?

doesn't follow. You don't know that they didn't read it! Only that they didn't write it. If the point of things like this is to be careful, then be careful.

DragonStrength 40 minutes ago

Well, they can serve it that way. Based on my experience, everyone knows who the person always serving slop on the team is except the person serving slop.

hansvm 33 minutes ago

How do you tactfully fix that, or can you?

conception 27 minutes ago

What the industry is discovering is that copywriting is actually a skill. And it becomes pretty obvious if you don’t have any of it.

Analemma_ 36 minutes ago

To be honest I don't particularly feel the need to give the benefit of the doubt to people who dump 10 paragraphs of AI on me. If they want to give a thorough explanation of it to prove they really understand it, that's fine and I can update on the new evidence, but I'm OK with my default baseline assumption being they didn't read it so I don't need to either.

rao-v 34 minutes ago

Perhaps:

Did you even read it through carefully once? If you couldn't bother to craft it, why should I read?

kylecazar 22 minutes ago

Especially for personal communication, I'm comfortable saying if you couldn't bother to write it, why should I read it.

If I'm reading reference material/documentation or an update, I care a bit less so long as it isn't tedious.

slongfield 30 minutes ago

I like Oxide's version of this: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers

The old social contract was that the writer had done more work than they were asking of the reader, but this is torn to shreds with LLM-generated text.

oejgirjdiejfiej 5 minutes ago

That is entirely invalid considering the existence of ghost writers and such.

No one reads a piece of text BECAUSE the writer had more work writing it than the writer will have reading it (this could end up not being true regardless of AI either way).

The “old social contract” is that readers trust the writers had something to say, and said it. The inner workings have always been irrelevant.

Trouble with genText is that it’s easy for your point to get lost in the narrative exactly because you didn’t write it—it’s like when you know something but can’t put it into words. Your own voice can get lost and so does the appeal to the readers. Nothing to do with effort, entirely to do with the content itself.

I don’t want to read your genAI text because I don’t trust that you managed to get your point across in prose.

dozerly 29 minutes ago

From my experience, they likely read 30% of it, convinced themselves that it was good enough and they thought about all of it, then shared it.

ofjcihen 28 minutes ago

There’s no reason to give these people the benefit of the doubt if they bother doing this.

Also the distinction between whether they read/wrote it is nil. Either is disrespectful.

forrestthewoods 26 minutes ago

Strongly disagree with your sentiment.

> You don't know that they didn't read it!

If someone sends me AI slop to read then I am going to assume and behave as if they didn’t read it until proven otherwise.

It is the responsibility of the sender to proactively say “I read this and stand by it as at least mostly correct and reasonable”.

They are also free to say “AI slop have not yet proof read”. Then I have an informed choice.

OzzyB 16 minutes ago

I don't understand this bandwagoning either. I'm a shit writer, there I dont write, but if I could prompt some AI w/ my thoughts and it generated something that passed for writing and wasn't shit, then you wouldn't be injesting my awesome insights b/c you think AI made them and dismiss it out of some kinda of hurrdurr spite? Makes no sense, and lets not forget the English-as-second language crowd, I guess they have nothing to say either...

here's my comment ran thru ChatGPT, I hope you dont read it!

""" I don’t really understand the bandwagoning around this either. I’m a terrible writer, so I generally don’t write much. But if I could give an AI my thoughts and have it turn them into something clear, readable, and actually worth reading, why would that suddenly make the ideas themselves less valuable?

You’d be dismissing my thoughts—not because they’re bad, but because AI helped me express them. That just seems like reflexive “AI bad” nonsense.

And that’s before you even get to people who speak English as a second language. Are we really saying their ideas somehow count for less if they use AI to communicate them more clearly? That makes no sense to me. """

furyofantares 15 minutes ago

If someone sends me LLM output that they read and thought was fine, then that's OK with me.

They might be wrong and it's not fine, and I have a few people I know who have a much higher tolerance than I do for LLM outputs, and I'm aware of that when they send them to me and I often reject it.

But it's a totally different category than someone who only skimmed what they sent me.

If someone sends me something they read and digested and think it's good, but I don't think it is, then I'm not upset with them. If someone sends me something without that first step, then I am.

(Of course they could tell me they didn't read it, and that's fine too, I can choose to read it or not.)

chiatruntime 42 minutes ago

Ironic that this site is AI-generated

chinathrow 27 minutes ago

Wouldn't hypocrite be more suitable?

xmprt 23 minutes ago

Not really ironic. They even say it here:

> Not anti-AI. Pro-giving-a-damn.

AI isn't the problem. The problem is that people are sending text without proof reading.

ortusdux 33 minutes ago

AI written, AI read

https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html

throwaway0q5347 an hour ago

TAI;DR.

I think maybe just AI;DR...?

jmarcher 41 minutes ago

Yes, somebody else came up with that last month (AFAIK): https://www.rickmanelius.com/p/aidr-ai-didnt-read

madcaptenor 39 minutes ago

I came up with it before that but I'm not going to claim I'm the only one, or even that I didn't hear it somewhere and have it get into my weights and stochastically parrot it later.

debugnik 7 minutes ago

I've been seeing "AI;DR" used sparingly for months, perhaps years now.

neilv 33 minutes ago

AI;DR fits. Though some deserve a stronger response -- "AI;FU" -- like the disingenuous AI-powered hiring spam targeting HN users recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849134

matheusmoreira 32 minutes ago

How many times have people written this exact same rant now? This is honestly getting more annoying than the AI generated content.

satvikpendem 30 minutes ago

Yeah how many times have we seen this sort of thing on HN now? We get it, people hate AI writing. But screeds like this can be even more annoying as it's pure clickbait for the HN crowd as every time these sorts of posts rocket to #1 on the homepage just like this one is now. HNers say they don't like algorithmic feeds but they sure fall for the same sort of thing they decry others for falling for.

user43928 26 minutes ago

On a more recent note, today I'm really fed up with Opus 5.5.

Yes, it's the best model right now if you want cheaper than Astra, but they increased the verbosity again!

It just keeps dumping whole novels on me. Its writing might be an improvement over the ludicrous Opus 5 speak, but much of the grating way of speaking is still there.

It's been three days since Tuesday and I'm already tired of Opus 5.5.

beebmam 34 minutes ago

I have my AI agents read documents on my behalf and then ask them questions. Whether those documents are written by humans or not.

doginasuit 36 minutes ago

It is hard to know what is getting more tiresome, AI writing or complaining about AI writing. We get it, we feel the same way.

Avicebron 34 minutes ago

Part of not allowing it to become normalized is complaining about it..

blitzar 33 minutes ago

Normalising complaining about a thing is the first step to normalising that thing.

bmoathn 29 minutes ago

IMO I'd rather have fewer enshittified unusable websites so filled with ads I can't actually read anything than some awkwardly written paragraphs that I can skim/move on. I'd rather the pitchforks have been pointed at ad revenue toxicity the past decade than the AI stuff being the focal. Just my opinion.

gcoakes 27 minutes ago

I used to feel this way, but now, I want more people to send me AI slop because I'm tired of human slop. I am tired of parsing through two word git commits where the author didn't care enough to tell Claude to write the commit message for them. Sure, I would prefer to read your personal thoughts on the change, but if the choice is between no meaningful information and an agent's mostly coherent if a bit verbose description, I'll take the AI.

The same goes for AI generated code. I've seen some code that I'm pretty sure would have been better quality if my 90 year old grandma was steering Claude. The standard that I want to hold myself is derived from the open source world like SQLite. Sadly, some people just want to take the minimal path to ticket completion without regard for future maintenance or pride in their work. At least AI is token predicting off the code bases that I admire.

queenkjuul 25 minutes ago

I can't even force myself to read Claude's multi-paragraph PR summaries, and instead just go read the code. They're barely coherent and incredibly verbose.

guessmyname 23 minutes ago

Why TAI-DR instead of TMAI;DR (pronounced “tee-my; dee-ar”) ?

As in “Too Much AI; Didn’t Read”.

gruntled-worker 33 minutes ago

Too Bandwagony; Didn't Bother

montroser 34 minutes ago

> a boundary, not an acronym problem

The irony...

bit-rot 32 minutes ago

Not the startup-themed website featuring logins and calls to action…

anonymouscaller 37 minutes ago

Well.. don't think I'll be reading because the site is AI

phyalow 41 minutes ago

I prefer the simpler “aidr”

Havoc 43 minutes ago

Really don't like the weird grey yellow sites...they're just ugly

pelagicAustral 26 minutes ago

There has been an ancient form of slop that the highest form of authority has read for hundreds of years, and its a presidential brief... The President doesn't reads all the stuff that goes on, he doesn't know, he is handled the a slopified version of reality. Now the presidential briefing is at everyone's hand.

rollinDyno an hour ago

I understand the sensation of disgust when being offered to read a piece of AI slop. However, I'm actually curious about how our sensitivity towards slop will evolve. I imagine people will have varying degrees of tolerance.

Afterall, AI slop doesn't necessarily mean the prompter didn't read. It just means they're OK with the AI phrasing. It's also possible that they read the output and had the AI update with whatever edits they prompted.

Writing this comment makes me more convinced that if us users of AI want our written work to be taken seriously, then we should also share our prompts. I hope we quickly converge into a standard way of sharing the prompts that generated a given product.

criemen 44 minutes ago

I hope that labs are actively working on the voice and writing styles of their models. I don't want to read slop in large part because their prose is overly verbose and complicated. If the models were writing simple sentences in mainstream English, mirroring the vocabulary used by my colleagues, I'd mind less than the current status.

Surely that's something that can be trained for.

bmoathn 38 minutes ago

I think they definitely are. One of the Opus 5.5 selling points in the release announcement was something like "less jargoney / rambling communication"

Might be a long road, but at least we'll have no shortage of good instagram memes in the meantime

senderista 38 minutes ago

This is largely a Claude problem and GPT models don't suffer from it to nearly the same extent.

bmoathn 40 minutes ago

I've been thinking the same. Imagine 5 years from now - nothing is slowing down. The pace that my SW teams can produce legitimately good code that my Sr devs are like "yeah looks good, comes with test coverage, tests look good, CI is green, ship it" - it's insane.

For written work, i think we're so new that over a couple years two things will happen 1 - people get kinda used to it (frog in pot?) 2 - the AI will keep getting better and reducing these cringey sounding tells

What will be tough is finding that line of "does this paragraph add value to X" but that applies whether a person wrote it or an AI.

nullc 40 minutes ago

I can say first hand after having years of my life blown by an (eventually) AI slop powered vexatious litigant and the thousands of pages of slop filings and slop evidence forgeries I had to read... I feel a physical urge to give anyone who slops me a black eye.

Probably not a typical response-- but perhaps it's useful to keep in mind that every day there are many people being victimized by attackers using AI (and shitty corporations.. wait I repeat myself). So in addition to the ordinary signals of indifference, ignorance, and carelessness that hitting someone with obvious LLM slop implies you'll also be accidentally taking on the voice of some people's abusers, and pick up the spillover effects of their impressions.

This can happen randomly, of course, -- picking up a chose phrase that someone else used-- but slop isn't just a random match. Right now an AI written piece (especially from claude) will identify itself over and over and over again in a way that wouldn't happen with another writer that happened to share some cultural background.

jazzkingrt 33 minutes ago

Sometimes at work I get slop emails from some VP or other, and the problem isn't the tone or use use of AI per se, it's that 2 sentences of meaningful content is diluted into 3 paragraphs for no discernible reason.

queenkjuul 21 minutes ago

I don't want your prompt either. Do the work to make "your" writing not sound like AI, or write it yourself, or don't expect me to read it.

RomanKornev 35 minutes ago

All the visually noisy parts really don't help it get the point across. More like the opposite.

It should be line https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

bmoathn 33 minutes ago

omg i love that. reminds me of the hours i've spent on the paperclip game

fb03 43 minutes ago

Really cool!

Reminds me of my own manifesto, which I've written since getting sick of dealing with the hype and gatekeeping machine that surrounds AI based development right now.

https://www.just-prompt-motherfucker.com/

dofm 26 minutes ago

Need a "website is Claudish; skipping to next" one-pager.

Do they really not understand that their website uses the most definitive form of design slop?

4lx87 35 minutes ago

Most people at my work don't think I'm using AI simply because I instruct it to never use more than two sentences of max 10-15 words each.

seki285 26 minutes ago

I'm not reading any slop, period.

cckolon an hour ago

Ironic that this itself is an obvious slop site

kkotak 41 minutes ago

AI Slop; Didn't Bother AS;DB

hajile 39 minutes ago

I’m a fan of AI;DR